Chapter 24: Volume 1- [ - 25 ]
The ability settled over my perception like a new lens being clicked into place. The world did not change — not visibly, not audibly — but a thin, translucent bar appeared in my lower vision, and when I looked at Elira, it populated with a number that glowed soft amber:
[ Elira Thorne — Arousal: 87/100 (fluctuating: 84↔89) ]
Eighty-seven. Eighty-four to eighty-nine. Fluctuating even in sleep, her body cycling through waves of residual arousal that the oil and the evening’s exertions had left smoldering in her nerves like embers in a banked fire.
’You really are a bitch, aren’t you,’ I thought, and the warmth in my chest was not affection but the satisfied recognition of a tool that had been properly calibrated.
My hand drifted down to her ass again. My finger found her anal — the same tight, reddened ring I had just vacated — and pushed inside. One finger, to the first knuckle. Her body flinched, a small hiccup in her breathing, and the arousal meter flickered: 89, 91, 88.
The tightness was remarkable. Her anal sucked at my finger like a mouth — pulling, gripping, the muscle contracting around the intrusion with a strength that made me think about what it would feel like around my cock when she was properly trained for it. I pulled out, my finger emerging with a soft ’pop’, and the meter dipped back to 87.
I rubbed her belly instead. Slow, circling strokes, feeling the taut skin, the life beneath it. She was warm and full and fuckable even in unconsciousness, and the urge to wake her, to spread her, to take her again was a physical pressure in my chest that I had to consciously push down.
Not yet. Not now. She needed rest. And I had other matters to attend to.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Looked down.
Martha lay beneath the bed frame, on the cold stone floor, her eyes wide open, her hand clamped over her mouth. Her face was pale — not the pale of fear alone, but the pale of a woman who had witnessed something that had reorganized her understanding of the world and found the new arrangement unbearable.
She had seen everything.
The oil. The massage. The milk. The fucking. The pregnant woman — the wife of Sir Garrick Thorne, the knight captain, the man who commanded the garrison and occupied the former lord’s chambers — on her back, on her knees, on her side, being fucked by the lord she had dismissed as a pathetic, gullible child. She had seen Elira’s face. She had heard the sounds. She had watched the milk.
And now she lay on the floor beneath the bed, staring up at me, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, her hand crushing her own mouth shut, and the fear in her gaze was the beautiful, clean, uncomplicated fear of a woman who understood — finally, truly understood — that she had misjudged the creature she had been living with.
"You are awake," I said. Not a question.
She shook her head rapidly. A lie so transparent it was almost endearing.
"You cannot fool me, Martha. I can hear you thinking."
Her thoughts confirmed it — a panicked, fragmented stream of ’oh gods oh gods he fucked her he fucked the knight’s wife the pregnant wife he is insane he is a monster he will kill me he already killed Aldric he will kill me too I need to—’
"Shh." I reached down and pinched her nipple through the thin shift she had been redressed in. The pink bud stiffened under my fingers, and I pulled — not gently, not cruelly, but with the firm, guiding pressure of a man leading an animal by its leash. Martha cried out, her hand falling from her mouth, her body dragging across the stone floor as I pulled her by the nipple toward the edge of the bed.
She emerged like something born — wet-eyed, gasping, her shift riding up around her waist, her heavy thighs scraping against the stone. I pulled her until she was free of the bed frame, then released her nipple and stepped back.
"Get up."
She tried. Her elbows shook. Her knees gave out. She managed to get to her hands and knees — the position of an animal, of a thing being presented — and stayed there, trembling, her head down, her heavy breasts hanging beneath her like ripe fruit.
I stood over her. My legs were spread, my weight balanced, my cock hanging limp between my thighs — still large, still heavy, even soft, a thick pendulum of flesh that swayed with my movements. I grabbed her hair. Tilted her face up.
"Harden it, bitch."
Her eyes filled. Her lips trembled. But she did not hesitate — not because she wanted to, but because the alternative was a dead knight in the treasury and the knowledge that the man holding her hair had put him there.
She opened her mouth. Her tongue came out — tentative, shaking, a small pink thing that touched the head of my cock with the delicacy of a woman testing whether a stove was hot. It was. She licked again. Again. Long, slow strokes, her tongue dragging from the base of the head to the tip and back, her eyes closed, her tears falling onto my shaft and mixing with her saliva.
She licked like her life depended on it.
Because it did.
My cock hardened in her mouth — slowly at first, then with gathering speed, the shaft thickening, the head swelling, the length increasing until her jaw was stretched wide and her lips were pulled thin around the girth. I reached into the drawer of the nightstand and produced a small, blue, diamond-shaped pill.
Viagra.
Not the system’s version — my version. The one thing that had materialized with me during transmigration, tucked into the lining of whatever metaphysical baggage I had carried between worlds. A modern pharmaceutical solution to a medieval problem.
I swallowed it dry.
The effect was almost immediate — a warm rush of blood southward, the kind of chemical certainty that no amount of natural arousal could match. My cock went from hard to granite in seconds, the shaft so rigid it ached, the head so flushed it was nearly purple, the veins standing out along the length like cables.
’System,’ I thought, looking at the stamina skill in the marketplace. ’Stamina Surge. One hundred points. One hour of unlimited stamina. No refractory period.’